A River Ran Wild

During a recent Common Core meeting (which we have every other Tuesday after school), I was introduced to the text "A River Ran Wild" by Lynne Cherry. I know many of you may already know about it, but since it was new to me, I definitely wanted to blog about it.  

Information on the book: This book centers upon these significant themes: human effects on the environment, pollution, and being a responsible citizen. Human effects on the environment are a significant concept. A River Ran Wild provides both text and illustrations that show the changes of pollutions throughout history and how people in each period affected the Nashua river. Beginning with the Natives and through today, this text supports the theme of human pollution.
It worked out great because we just finished our study of the Industrial Revolution. Our main focus with this text was to work on Cause and Effect.  My anchor charts are completely done in class with students so they are not very pretty....just a little disclosure!
There's lots of vocabulary in the text that may be difficult for students so the first time we read it, students jotted down words that they weren't sure of it and we kept a list of those words on another anchor chart. Students defined the words so that the next time we read the text, we would be able to better understand what we were reading. When we came to an unfamiliar word, we referred back to our chart and sometimes had to use context clues to figure out which meaning was being used in the text. 
The kids LOVED this text and I did, too! I can definitely see using this book in the future. Here are some pages from the text. What I couldn't find was the pages that had text, but those pages have pictures of inventions from that time period around the edges. This is a great text with wonderful illustrations!



3 comments

  1. This sounds like an excellent mentor text, I'll be adding it to my list of books to keep an eye out for!

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  2. I love that book too! And I think your anchor charts were a great way to get the kids thinking. Thanks for sharing!

    Nichole
    The Craft of Teaching

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  3. I have a unit freebie for this book if you are interested. Nice lesson!

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